Altice USA's three-year repair: 115 new VPs, an AI agent, narrowing losses

When Dennis Mathew left an 18-year Comcast career to run Altice USA in 2022, he inherited what Light Reading calls a generally broken company: subscriber losses that were worsening, product lines in need of a refresh, out-of-whack pricing and packaging, and a debt mountain raising questions about its long-term prospects. Mathew says his first diagnosis was cultural — people wanted to serve customers but worked in silos, with broken systems and processes — so the rebuild started with culture and morale, not technology.

The rebuild, as Mathew describes it, meant bringing in more than 115 new vice presidents across sales, marketing, technology, customer care and finance, and holding roundtables with front-line employees to hear what local markets were saying. Phase one was stabilising operations around digital and AI tools.

The centrepiece is 'AVA', an AI agent powered by Google Cloud. Built into retention tools, it replaced error-filled spreadsheets where reps manually reviewed hundreds of line items, surfacing the two to four offers that best fit each customer and competitive situation; it is now expanding into other customer-care and sales tools.

By Q2 2025 the numbers were moving: quarterly residential broadband losses narrowed to 35,000 from 51,000 a year earlier, beating the 42,000 analysts expected; relationship Net Promoter Score rose eight points; broadband performance earned high marks from Ookla and PCMag. Mathew also rejected the uniform national pricing of peers like Comcast for 'hyper-local' offers tailored to local segments and rivals — from below-market-price fibre overbuilders to fixed wireless access — with flat EBITDA targeted for the year after a lengthy run of declines.

Quarterly broadband losses cut from 51,000 to 35,000 (beating the 42,000 analysts expected); relationship NPS up eight points; flat EBITDA targeted for the year.

The sequence matters: culture and leadership first, systems second — Mathew judged that new tools would not stick in silos with broken processes and low morale.

AVA attacks the highest-friction workflow first (retention offers picked from error-riddled spreadsheets), so the AI's value shows up where reps and customers feel it immediately.

Hyper-local pricing accepts a cost of complexity that national players refuse, turning a besieged regional operator's proximity to its markets into a weapon against fibre and FWA entrants.

A broken operator's first repair is cultural: rebuilding morale and replacing the leadership bench created the base on which AI tools and pricing fixes could actually stick.

As of September 2025, Mathew called the turnaround the fourth inning of a game going to extra innings: EBITDA was targeted flat for the year after lengthy declines, AVA was expanding across customer care and sales, and the company was exploring new ways to manage its debt load while still viewed as a potential M&A target.